Monday, November 17, 2008

Hertford loopy

The trains I get to work are generally pretty reliable... But over the last three weeks or so, there have been broken rails, broken trains and broken signals four times, and all on the train to work where it's stressful rather than just irritating. When this happens (if you're lucky and they detect the problem while you're still far enough north) they send you round a side part of the track called the Hertford Loop, where you become far too knowledgeable about stations called things like Gordon Hill (surely this isn't the name of a station, but the name of a footy commentator?). This morning the train was only 27 minutes late getting into London (neatly depriving me by 3 minutes of claiming part of the journey cost back on my season ticket) - which is an improvement on last Thursday which was nearly 90 minutes late...

But this isn't entirely a whinge; Christmas knitting was done. In this case, some gloves for (blogless) Sue's mum, a pair of Serpentines for her to garden in (I'll show you what Sue made me in return in due course...). I cast on as we left Cambridge and am four rows south of the thumb-separation this evening...

And because the ribbing on the cuff is quite mindless, I also managed to read, and finished Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, which was fascinating - the story of a cholera epidemic in Soho in the 1840s and how a doctor and the local curate pooled their knowledge to map its spread and prove that it was a waterborne disease (rather than a product of bad air, or miasma, as previously thought...). The author has some interesting ideas about how this knowledge/mapping could be used, and is being used, in contemporary urban contexts, and a rather welcome enthusiasm about the energy and creativity of large urban centres rather than the standard prophet-of-doom approach... It's engagingly written and quite a quick read.